Notes on Sport and Travel Author:George Henry Kingsley, Mary Henrietta Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill CONCERNING A HURRICANE—THE SOUTHERN SEAS AND FISHING THEREIN After making several trips to the Mediterranean, and one to Egypt (this time with the Duke... more » of Rutland), in 1866, he accompanied Lady Herbert of Lea and her children on a tour through Spain, and in 1867 went with her eldest son—the Earl of Pembroke—to the South Seas. For the greater part of the next three years ' the Earl and the Doctor' were travelling together in Australia and New Zealand, and cruising in the Pacific, ' dropping down from one lovely island to another, seeing the strangest sights imaginable,' in the Albatross, a little coasting schooner, which was purchased in Auckland, and fitted up as a yacht (captained by one James Braund—a native of Bucks, near Clovelly). Their experiences in the Society, the Harvey, and the Navigator Groups— how, one dark and stormy night, the Albatross took the coral, and how they subsequently fared for nine days on a desolate island named Nukumbasanga(a ' little coral sandy place,' on which the only sign of human life discoverable savoured grimly of human death—consisting, as it did, of a native ' Morae' surrounded by charred posts, ' the height of which told very plainly what had been hung to cook there'); how they escaped in the yacht's boats from this spot, which was absolutely teeming with suggestions of the most exquisite nature to a party of shipwrecked mariners, and ' were hour after hour pulling and baling in a rough, broken sea,' until at length they were picked up by a vessel bound for Caruka—may be seen reflected in the South Sea Bubbles They seem to have been almost the first people who went yachting in the South Pacific. Writing to his mother, George Kingsley said : ' Here we are, yachting in the great Southern Ocean—the first who have tried it in thes...« less